I decided to take a look at some of the key updates along the evolution of both Superman and Batman’s super-identities. In Part One: Superman.

Recently, Superhero movies helmed by big-name directors, who bring their own visual style to the set, have risen above the existing pipeline of average superhero movie productions. Joe Johnston brought his WWII fantasy flair to Captain America, and now Zack Snyder, maker of the Watchmen movie, is creating his dark and gritty, however stylized, Man of Steel.

Snyder’s Superman takes a hyper retrospective stylization to his new version, especially compared to the more generic and contemporary looking Superman Returns movie from 2006. The Man of Steel departs heavily from the earlier Superman branding and most resembles the earlier comics and cartoon shows. Apart from any similarities, the sharp serif and ultra heavy spine on the S are very unique to the logo’s history.

Superman first appeared in Action Comics Number One drawn by Joe Shuster. While the color palette is slightly darker, the general colors of the suit are not that different from the most famous version of Superman played by Christopher Reeve. However, the S has no serifs and looks almost purposely like it was drawn with a single brush stroke. Most notably, what would become the pentagonal shield instead has two inlets on either side as if it was some kind of badge.

The biggest color difference in the logo’s history comes from In the original “Superman” cartoon. The logo is most similar in shape to Zack Snyder’s version. The color palette however has a red letter S on a nearly black background with yellow pentagonal outline.

The infamous original live action TV show, which began in black and white in the 50′s but later moved into color was a large step from the comics and cartoon to the generic Superman color palette and shield shape we know today. The S has a distinct 50′s design with the thinner spine in the middle and overall horizontally stretched letterform. The S also gains its serif on the top terminal.

The public would have to wait until 1978 until the next major (non-comic book) revision to Superman was released on screen directed by Richard Donner with Christopher Reeve in Superman: The Movie.

What became the most widely seen version of Superman’s uniform actually doesn’t stray much from George Reeves’ suit. However, as the 50′s version’s logo looks wide and sleek, the 70′s-80′s version almost looks like the same design was pushed in on the sides to make it fatter.

For promotional purposes, a silver version of the S was used that actually resemble’s Zack Snyder’s logo shape, but this version had no real in-movie involvement over the course of the four movie franchise.

Next time: Batman’s evolution from The Batman to The Dark Knight. Stay Tuned.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot the Tim Burton Superman that never was:

Maurizio Cattelan is relatively young to be retiring, but he has been pretty prolific, and has several world-renowned super-hits. After announcing he would retire from making new pieces, it looks like his retrospective “All” at the Guggenheim, is his last clever turn on the establishment.

There’s a lot of fun in his work, but the biggest play is on the way the work is exhibited. This time, Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the building is the establishment Cattelan is playing with. Since all the art is hanging from the ceiling, and the normal gallery walls are bare and for the first time I’ve ever seen, people are looking out over the ledge instead of in towards the walls.

Frank Lloyd Wright understood the normal exhibition space where people snaked through square rooms with paintings on the walls as the challenge to avoid when he made the Guggenheim Museum. Viewers in his museum would embark on a journey through the exhibit. Walking through the Guggenheim impresses upon the viewer an almost natural sense of time passing as one walks up through the gallery.

This sense of time passing is obviously suitable for a retrospective. Cattelan’s work is literally suspended, giving it the feeling of floating in time. His most famous pieces, the KKK Elephant (“Not Afraid of Love”), Middle Finger, (“L.O.V.E.”) and others are viewed, whether you like it or not, not in their original gallery settings but literally against the rest of his work.

This obviously changes the original context of each piece. The statue of Hitler kneeling (“Him”) is suspended by strings going under his arms, making it look more like he’s just impishly hanging than kneeling, atoning for his sins. It’s still funny, but might lose some of its true meaning hanging the way it does. Other things stand out to be noticed, like how much Cattelan used taxidermy and wax sculptures — true to life pieces to express his message. Seeing flawlessly recreated napping puppies scattered on hanging palettes throughout the structure make you think that they’re real puppies that don’t know they’re hanging in the middle of a museum, but instead napping on someones living room.

The last novelty of the exhibit is the expositionary pamphlet, detailing the title and year of each piece, which can be identified through a numbered diagram of the exhibit. Given the sheer size and amount of work, the pamphlet is a funny accomplishment in and of itself, not that you really need to know the details and history to really enjoy Cattelan’s work.

Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Guggenheim closes January 22nd.

A polaroid from TrustoCorp's recent exhibition at The Opera Gallery depicting one of thier guerilla installations on the street

Two of the biggest (but by no means the first) names in street art: Shepard Fairy and Banksy literally started using the streets as their canvases. And once their pieces were up, anything could happen to them, from being turned into a spontaneous protected shrine to getting painted over. Maybe the art looks very similar to work from the Dada and Pop Art periods, but the shift in location is really the message. It’s not art for arts sake. It’s the act of communicating with everyone, not just those strolling through galleries.

Which is an ironic introduction to a Street Art show I saw in a gallery.  TrustoCorp’s Life Cycle isn’t exactly gratified pieces of brick wall torn off a building and put in a gallery, but some of the pieces did consist of posters and objects that were once in the wild (or duplicates of those left in public). I thoroughly enjoyed the pieces, most of which are sprayed and stenciled,* and use brilliant color palettes to get across TrustoCorp’s simple, mostly sociopolitical messages in an obvious way.

But, as I said, the real method of delivery for TrustoCorp isn’t usually places like The Opera Gallery. Their work exists on the streets of New York for some lucky people, but for most, on the internet via twitter and their Flickr Photostream, where they post pictures of all the guerrilla installations. The gallery show actually had a video of TrustoCorp’s members (sometimes totally unmasked!) installing one of their pieces, on a giant billboard, Exit Through the Giftshop style. (This only reminded me of my half-joking prediction that they might just put some stuff up, take a picture, then take it down and leave, which kind of cheapens the whole thing.) Although I’ve never seen or heard of someone actually getting to a TrustoCorp piece on the street, I trust they aren’t totally lying to people and not leaving them up.* Not that those prone to whipping out their checkbooks in Soho art galleries really care that the print they’re paying for may just as easily be torn off a phone booth panel with a bit of luck and good timing.

In the end, I like TrustoCorp’s pieces, their construction, craft, and design. And I’d love to have one, but I’m pretty sure my best bet is to hack one of a billboard right after they tweet a picture of it. That’s not really stealing, is it?

*UPDATED

from the fine people at TrustoCorp:

“…2 things to clarify: We always leave our work outside & the paintings are spray/stencil, not screen”

The post above has been corrected to reflect this.

Since the days of Bloglines and similar RSS reader’s have passed, GReader is really the only legitimate game in town, and is one of the last Google product to receive the new Google visual treatment. Reorganized whitespace, more obvious links and a reaffirmed visual hierarchy could have gone a long way on a service that had bits and pieces of sharing, subscribing and reading functionality added over time.

The Original UI of Google Reader v1

I was so happy for this design update that I pretty much ignored all the outcry about sharing, a much publicized controversy. Here I’d rather discuss some of the peculiar design decisions, and the criticism coming not just from dissatisfied users, but former Google Reader designers themselves.

Reader is no rockstar of the Google web product library. It fulfills a simple purpose, and to my knowledge only caters to a relatively small but active user base, including myself. The changes have been received as so negative for such a loved website that even a former project manager for Google Reader, Kevin Fox, has offered his…

… services to Google, rejoining for a three month contract in order to restore and enhance the utility of Google Reader, while keeping it in line with Google’s new visual standards requirements.

There is irony to be appreciated in this controversy with respect to Reader’s redesign. If Google Reader is a gateway to content, what it filters out is all of the user interface designs from the original host websites, leaving only the written and media (pictures, videos, audo) content from the RSS feed for us to consume. This service is so simple, that its not hard to understand why the current Google Reader team would want to strip their website down to the bare minimum, leaving the RSS feed’s content as the most important priority.

But, as a former designer for Google Reader Brian Shih mentioned, the priority of the actual delivered content doesn’t even survive the application of Google’s new style.

When you log into Reader, what the hell do you think your primary objective is? Did you answer “stare at a giant header bar with no real estate saved for actual reading”?

While there has been a lot of criticism and praise for Google’s new universal UI design, but as Shih points out, the new design system isn’t even uniformly applied to reader, with some important hierarchical conventions regarding color ignored:

The second and more obvious change, is that someone took the magic color-removing wand and drenched the whole page in grey. It’s so unbelievably stark, it’s hard to imagine a more desolate experience. Even G+ has blue links for post titles. Blue titles are good enough for Google search. Reader, which is built entirely around posts with titles, does away with this in the name of the almighty grey god.

Fox and Shih as former designers/project managers have a lot of knowledge and perspective on the subject of Google Reader, and their blog posts are worth reading.

As an active user though, some of the grievances I had with my much loved Google Reader remain: the RSS feeds don’t automatically update in the reading pane (you have to re-click the subscription in the side column, thereby refreshing the feed), and the suggestions engine, especially from a web company built on search and aggregation, is pretty ineffective.

While small, I mention these two items on my Google wish list because in the end, the most important judgement is how the individual uses it, not some designer in a laboratory with a 36″ computer monitor and industrial Internet connection. Are your criticisms based in an unnatural and uneconomical user interface, or simply that you were used to Google Reader the way it was?

This weekend, as a co-host on The Upper East Side Podcast, I had the chance to interview Danny Fein, the founder of Litographs.com, which is a website specializing in prints made from the text of classical literature and other texts.

Click Here to Listen. The Interview starts about 19 minutes in.

There are two parts to my discussion. Not Netflix and Qwikster, but business and branding.

Existing Landing Page (Current as of Posting)

First the business.
A lot changed when Reed Hastings sent me an email at 4am EST on Monday morning. Leading up to Monday morning Netflix’s share price had dropped about 50% in a matter of months, when the rest of the market was moving sideways. The reaction to Netflix splitting their pricing plans for customers was not received well, as it was a big jump from the previously small incremental increases they had come to rely on. But, on top of that, Netflix customers fled the company’s increases in a higher number than the company anticipated (about 1 million). I, personally decided to drop my streaming plan all together and move from 1 DVD at a time to 2 for a lower price than 1 DVD with Streaming. And now, in the post 4am Monday morning world, we have two companies, one for DVD by Mail (and presumably games, wherever that came from) and one for streaming.

So here we are after all these dramatic developments, with two separate brands under the Netflix label. Although I joked about Mr. Hastings sending the 4am email right after he wrote it, I know hes a smart man. The going explanation of the split branding is built on the assumption that the streaming of content and the DVD delivery service are two separate businesses.

While I think that people believe this to be true, to me its kind of irrelevant. Yes, on the back end they’re different businesses, which should have different contracts, fees, infrastructure, etc. But, what is gained by two brand names, one with extreme value and one with almost none?

(As an aside, its also worth noting that adding video games by disk, unless its at very little cost to the company is not nearly as profitable and popular as one would think, and Gamefly is a great example. But for some reason, this will be an added part of the new Qwikster service.)

Share Price from July to September

Branding
The Netflix red envelope is pretty iconic. While the red envelope has been under attack from rivals like Redbox and even threatened through Netflix’s frenetic redesigns of its website, whenever I walk down the street people see my carrying my red envelope to the mail and know what it is instantly. (People even use the name like people use Google: I’ll Netflix it)

Its worth noting that the original Netflix is the DVD-by-mail outfit, where you viewed the online library and created a queue for your by mail DVDs. That was Netflix. That company grew to a billion dollar business when until only recently streaming was more than an afterthought of the product.

This DVD-by-mail service is now spun off (as of 4am Monday morning) under the name Qwikster, with some very questionable preparation and justification. According to CEO Hastings, its called Qwikster because the DVDs come quickly through the mail.

Now, I’m not Brand New, although I eagerly await their review of the new Qwikster identity, but I have a lot of issues with it, apart from the original business losing its name to the new business for the sake of exploiting the existing brand value. Qwikster is just a weird word, and just long enough to be confusing to spell (unlike services like Hulu who have meaningless names that are at least easy to spell). Also, since when has DVD-by-mail held that the DVDs come quickly as a point of pride? While Qwikster/Netflix has an incredible system of distribution, its still the US Mail that gets you your disk in two days. The previous name, Netflix, instead pointed to the infrastructure on the internet for you to view, order and receive suggestions of what to request.

As I alluded to above, why have two names at all? The popular hypothesis that its because the DVD-by-Mail service is from the past and is dying is unsupported by two reasons: one, its still most of Netflix’s revenue, two, the two brands are still part of the same company, and three, what does Mr. Hastings gain from giving the DVD service, literally, a bad name? To me the simplest solution is to just design the website so they are more obviously separated, but not so separated that if you have accounts with both services that you have to rate movies on both sites now to get suggestions.

So while the Netflix name may make a lot of sense for a streaming service, that’s not what it has meant for almost 5 years. And on top of that, adding a whole new name seems like a lot of work when the simplest solution, to me, is a design solution. But I guess when you’re a carpenter all you see is nails.

Disclosure: I’ve been a Netflix customer for 4 years and own shares of the company.

While the portrait of Robert E. Lee in Lincoln's hair is probably a myth, the fasces of his chair's arms are obvious

While the history of the modern Fascist movement goes back to 1900, its adopted symbol, called the fasces, is a bundle of wooden rods tied together around an axe. Meant to symbolize the strength of many united as one, it was used in its physical form in Ancient Rome for the civic enforcers of the Emperor and local Magistrates.

But how did this ancient symbol of Roman power, and more recently dictatorial power, come to appear all over classically modeled art and civic buildings in the United States?

A Roman Lictor

First of all its worth noting that, as seen above in the Lincoln Memorial, many times the fasces are depicted without the axe heads, which historically signified physical power and corporal punishment. And secondly, the fasces, like the swastika was truly hijacked by Italian Fascism from an otherwise respectful history as graphic element. The fasces historically symbolize the relative weakness of one to the strength of many, as a metaphor of what’s provided in representative government.

But, like with the Nazi’s branding, the fasces adoption by Italian Fascism has forever altered the way people view its symbol. The novelty, is that it was such a utilized design element that many are still viewable from their original context today. Personally, I think this is a better example than the swastika, if simply because display of the swastika in western countries remains almost completely nonexistent or even illegal.

Periodically I find myself re-researching historical graphic design movements, the Bauhaus and Italian Futurism being the two most often. Recently while reading about the latter I came across a Tommaso Marinetti quote about history that really stuck out to me:

The past is necessarily inferior to the future. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor?

Marinetti wasnt a graphic designer as much as he was (or wanted to be) a revolutionary of this Futurist movement. Both ironically and fittingly I though of his message of leaving history and pushing into the future in todays terms. So many pieces and products and advertising is disclaimed with some version of “past performance is no assurance of future results.” This applies to almost everything, from pharmaceuticals, to financial services, to governments. And it brings up the further irony that history is supposed to repeat itself. Maybe this was what Marinetti was trying to get away from with his new movement. Futurism was about less (or no) focus on whats been done, good or bad, and more on what we can do. The possibilities are endless, although in retrospect (ha!) Marinetti and his fellow idealistic Italians might have been a bit too focused on speed and less so on what they were speeding towards.

Good Morning Vietnam
What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong

This is probably one of the first examples of this I ever saw and really noticed. Louis Armstrong’s eternally optimistic song pancaked on top of the Vietnam War. The creepiest part of a lot of these pairs is that things seem to fit so perfectly, but theres a recurring feeling of perversion that as a viewer is hard to shake.

Watchman
Unforgettable, Nat King cole

In the scene, The Death of the Comedian, a former superhero with an ironic name (the stuff he does in the movie/graphic novel are mostly not funny at all) gets what’s long been coming to him. Originally starting out as source music from the TV, it helps give a pretty gruesome fight the feeling of a ballet.

Dr. Strangelove
We’ll Meet Again, Vera Lynn

Perhaps one of the best ironic movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece is just the first of many examples of inducing irony using soundtrack and visual. The pairing of file footage of the destruction caused by nuclear weapons with We’ll Meet Again is funny for the first 10 seconds, but as the whole song plays, the viewer gets the idea that this movie may not have been that funny.

Reservoir Dogs
Stuck in the Middle with You, Stealer’s Wheel

With the way Quentin Tarantino uses soundtracks I had to include him somewhere on this list.  His own special brand of violent, dark humor makes him a magnet for this special type of irony. Through the movie’s own fictional radio station, Tarantino sets a classic rock background to one of the most awkward and painful scenes in recent movie history.

Goodfellas
Layla, Eric Clapton

Another huge American auteur director, Martin Scorsese is also a huge proponent of putting popular songs in his movies. While Layla might not be the most happy song (none of Clapton’s really are) the piano half definitely doesn’t seem to be the proper soundtrack to a series of bloody murders.

American Psycho
Hip To Be Square, Huey Lewis and the News

“He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a more cynical, bitter sense of humor” The irony in this scene is so obvious it gets splattered all over the Style Section. Not to mention, the songs message about conformity is pretty much what Patrick Bateman tries to personify to hide his real self.

House, MD
Forget Your Troubles, Come on Get Happy

I wouldn’t normally include a TV show on this, but I think this example is so obvious and effective. While drifting out of consciousness after a dangerous surgery, one of the characters has a fantasy/nightmare represented in a golden-era of cinema type music performance. I’m not sure whats more ironic, the House MD version or the original.

Its safe to say the contemporary cult of Helvetica was either put in the spotlight, or maybe even caused by Gary Hustwit’s documentary. For everyone it highlighted something designers see on so many signs, maps, books ads, etc. There is a fascination of how something so simple can be almost impossible not to see on a daily basis. Why is it so used, what makes it so great. There is plenty of room to analyze and compliment.

But what I didn’t know (or more likely learned and forgot) was that Helvetica, designed by Eduard Hoffmann and Max Miedinger, was actually once Neue Haas Grotesk. It was named after the foundry that produced it, which ended up merging with type giant Linotype. Hoffmann and Miedinger’s original designs for Neue Haas Grotesk have actually been resurrected, and was previously for sale through Commercial Type.

Arial vs. Helvetica

If the new (old) Neue Haas Grotesk is the preservation/appreciation side of recent Helvetica history, there is no shortage of detractors. I remember hearing the legend that the only reason Arial exists is because Microsoft needed to bundle a font with Windows and didn’t want to pay the licensing fee to Linotype for use of Helvetica. Ive looked to find a definitive confirmation of this claim and, through the “probably“s and “i heard”s, I am still looking. But, poor little Arial got itself into a pretty good gig this past April with the help of design blog idsgn.

April Fools day is anarchy on the Internet, and this past one was no different, but idsgn pulled a great one with the “debut” of a Helvetica-killer typeface called Sonoran.

I am proud to say I was not gotten by this one (although if I was it would not have been the first design April Fools prank to fool me).

Not all attempts to kill the respected Helvetica, however, are so good natured. Type designer Bruno Maag was recently interviewed for Creative Review and gave a pretty stunning critique against Helvetica and its use.

It’s quite poorly crafted and has become completely overused. People go on about Arial and how awful it is, and Comic Sans, what an atrocity that is, why not the same about Helvetica?

Maag’s critique is relentless, and I must admit it was a bit of a refreshing read, if not slightly melodramatic. As an alternative to the Helvetica beast, Maag has produced his own solution, the first “opposition font” I’ve ever heard of, called Aktiv Grotesk.

In terms of design usage, seeing new pieces with Helvetica on a Vignellian scale is probably behind us. I do find myself wondering: in another five decades, will there be another typeface that could truly rival Helvetica?